We are working to market the site. I am in the midst of writing a press release to Santa Barbara's Pacific Coast Business Times to get some traction and interest in the community. I am still working with all the Chambers to get their buy-in. We already have the support of the Santa Barbara Chamber, and the Carpinteria Chamber distributed our BizConnect "insert" with their newsletter. Goleta Chamber and I are in talks to get their logo up on the top as well. It's a gentle, coaxing process.

We have begun to build internship and job postings on the site, and we are getting bites already. The Scheinfeld Center has a new, but robust, internship program, so we decided to post our offerings on BizConnect to see what would happen. We have already received responses from students using the site, so that's a good sign.

We built a community business calendar for which we have receive incredible feedback! There are so many activities happening around town with all the business-related organizations, we thought it would be great to build an inclusive calendar, because it really is difficult to keep track of it all. So, the calendar offers a little bonus, and hopefully it will help bring people to the site.

Another item I am working on is to capture the students who built profiles on a now defunct college site called the "Media Incubator." Media students uploaded their portfolios, and searched for jobs and created teams for projects. The site lost funding and went down. I thought it was a good idea to try to rescue some of the momentum they had. We shall see if we get faculty buy-in to use BizConnect to promote student portfolios, giving them a direct connection to the business community.

Finally, Lorrie Thomas is a signed contractor, getting ready to deliver 10 more video workshops on social media and marketing at the end of the month.

I realized today that I missed a June entry. (Sorry.) There has been quite a bit of shuffling around here and I had to move my office - which is a good thing - but it has been very discombobulating. I have moved to main campus from a satellite campus, and I think this is going to offer huge exposure to students that we haven't yet had. We are newly located in the Career Center, and will be working to actively collaborate with the Career Center. We are hoping BizConnect will benefit from all this!

I will be gone the first two weeks of August, so I will try to post upon return.